This Blog is about many things Rainer is interested in. This happens to include syslog, astronomy and other fun things.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

syslog data modeling capabilities

As part of the IETF discussions on a common logging format for sip, I explained some sylsog concepts to the sip-clf working group.

Traditionally, syslog messages contain free-form text, only - aimed at human observers. Of course, today most of the logging information is automatically being processed and the free-form text creates ample problems in that regard.

The recent syslog RFC series has gone great length to improve the situation. Most importantly, it introduced a concept called "Structured Data", which permits to express information in a well-structured way. Actually, it provides a dual layer approach, with a corase designator at the upper layer and name/value pairs at the lower layer.

However, the syslog RFC do NOT provide any data/information modeling capabilities that come with these structured data elements. Their syntax and semantics is to be defined in separate RFCs. So far, only a few examples exist. One of them is the base RFC5424, which describes some common properties that can be contained in any syslog message. Other than that, RFC5674, which describes a mapping to the Alarm MIB and ITU perceived severities and RFC5675, which describes a mapping to SNMP traps. All of them are rather small. The IHE community, to the best of my knowledge, is currently considering using syslog structured data as an information container, but has not yet reached any conclusion.

Clearly, it would be of advantage to have more advanced data modeling capabilities inside the syslog base RFCs, at least some basic syntax definitions. So why is that not present?

One needs to remember that the syslog standardization effort was a very hard one. There were many different views, "thanks" to the broad variety of legacy syslog, and it was extremely hard to reach consensus (thus it took some years to complete the work...). Next, one needs to remember that there is such an immense variety in message content and objects, that it is a much larger effort to try define some generic syntaxes and semantics (I don't say it can not be done, but it is far from being easy). In order to get the basics done, the syslog WG deciced to not dig down into these dirty details but rather lay out the foundation so that we can build on it in the future.

I still think this is a good compromise. It would be good if we could complement this foundation with some already existing technology. SNMP MIB encoding is not the right way to go, because it follows a different paradigm (syslog is still meant to be primarily clear text). One interesting alternative which I saw, and now evaluate, is the ipfix data modeling approach. Ideally, we could reuse it inside structured data, saving us the work to define some syslog-specific model of doing so.

The most important task, however, is to think about, and specify, some common "information building blocks". With these, I mean standard properties, like source and destination ID, mail message id, bytes sent and received and so on. These, together with some standard syntaxes, can greatly relieve problems we face while consolidating and analyzing logs. Obviously, this is an area that I will be looking into in the near future as well.

It may be worth noting that I wrote a paper about syslog parsing back in 2004. It was, and has remained, work in progress. However, Adiscon did implement the concept in MonitorWare Console, which unfortunately never got wider exposure. Thinking about it, that work would benefit greatly from the availability of standardized syslog data models.